BankSimple Blog

I like their site: https://banksimple.com/ Simple design, easy navigation, and a nice overview of the important features. My favorite part of the site is at the bottom of the page: "The BankSimple Team." It's rare but refreshing to see people attach their names, bios, and pictures to banks and financial companies. I'm excited for their launch - these guys are clearly taking some steps in the right direction.

Probably BankSimple, but it hasn't launched yet. https://banksimple.com/

They list all the advantages here: https://banksimple.com/#vision In short, no surprise fee's and simple online banking (with extensive mobile support).

While your site layout is very nice, it's seems like the theme is a bit distant from the subject matter, which you describe as an RPG for fitness. I guess I was expecting less https://banksimple.com/ and more http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/

Novell developed Vibe in Scala: https://vibe.novell.com/ BankSimple is building on Scala: https://banksimple.com/ Nasa uses Scala in production: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/6605

Do you feel this is more obnoxious than a fixed header bar? Lots of people do the fixed header bar (https://banksimple.com/ comes to mind immediately) and I don't ever see complaints about those.

There are some banks that are focusing heavily on having a strong web presence. Bank Simple (http://banksimple.com), they're currently looking for front-end dev's. It's possible but most large banks don't care about their web presence and most wouldn't be looking for PHP developers.

Your page doesn't function well as a landing page or give enough information straight away about how it all works. The comment from Ben Thacker (facebook comment) is the kind of thing you need to get to the user quickly: "For US bank-account-holders only, an interesting idea. Choose whether or not to donate $1 per day to a variety of charities pre-vetted by Philanthroper. Religious/personal appeals are excluded, and the website makes its money from ads, not by taking a cut. The only fee is a 1% charge for the payment processing." https://www.banksimple.com/ has a pretty epic page/intro, open source too. Do some testing anyway, but it's a good idea you have got going there. Congratulations on your launch.

from the FAQ (https://www.banksimple.com/faq/) > If you don’t charge hidden fees, how do you make money? We make money from two sources: interchange and interest margin. Interest margin is the revenue earned from lending, less what they pay on deposits. For example a bank may charge a customer 12% to borrow money, but pay 5% interest on a savings account. The difference, less any defaults on the loan, is revenue to the bank. Interchange is a small revenue source that card issuing banks earn whenever that card is used at a store. Typically banks earn less than 1% for each time the card is used to make a purchase. These are both great revenue streams, but banks got greedy and started charging additional fees to bolster their revenue. Without hundreds or thousands of branches, our operation is low cost, so we don’t need to rely on extraneous fee revenue.

You might be interested in this previous Hacker News post: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1355292 "Twitter's Alex Payne quits, heads onto something new", namely http://banksimple.net/

Perhaps you can try contacting the people at Banksimple ( https://banksimple.net/ ) and see if you can help them out at all. If your description of your skill set is accurate, you might be able to help them. That's the only online banking startup that I could think of, although there are probably others that people can suggest.

It's worth noting that BankSimple has a blog entry endorsing USAA as the best existing bank in the US: http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/21/the-best-bank-in-the-us/ .

It's not just a pretty interface to Bank of America or anything like that. But they aren't a normal bank with a charter and millions of dollars put up in bonds to allow them to operate legally. They haven't gone into detail about exactly how everything works, but they have a "network of banks" where the money will be stored (which is how they get it FDIC insured), and they sit on top of that in some way. http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/23/status-update/ >When we first started thinking about starting a bank we looked into the de novo banking process. This is the process by which new banks are formed from scratch. This is both expensive and, more importantly, it takes too long to launch. It is near impossible to innovate with an imposed three year launch delay. The best way to serve your needs is to launch quickly and to adapt our offering to meet your individual needs. Modern technology lets us do that. To achieve this we are planning to launch with a special corporate structure. We are bringing together a group of financial institutions to provide our underlying banking services. Our partner banks hold all deposits in insured accounts.

As far as I know, yes, you are, in fact, completely wrong. The only thing partner banks handle is the actual money. You never talk to them. https://banksimple.com/faq/#whatthedealis

I think you are wrong - From their own FAQ: So, what’s the deal...are you a bank? No, but we replace your current banking relationship. That is, BankSimple provides a modern online banking experience, top-notch customer service, and beautiful mobile apps. Our partner banks hold our customers’ funds in FDIC-insured products and ensure regulatory compliance. BankSimple’s partner banks aren’t large banks, and have been chosen for the safety of their balance sheets and technological capabilities. https://banksimple.com/faq/#whatthedealis

That's correct. We're also using Visa for processing. You can read more about our partners here: http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/partners-funding/

> I like the transaction searching capabilities shown in the demo, but I was hoping to see more info on how to do actual "banking" tasks. Can I initiate a wire transfer from an internet cafe in Laos? Can people send a check to an address in the US that automatically gets deposited in my account? That sort of thing. When these guys came on the scene, I got the impression that that was the kind of thing they'd be doing better than other banks. Frankly, sorting my past transactions just isn't a problem I desperately need to have solved. Did you watch the whole thing? They showed sending money through the website. You can deposit checks by mail or with your phone (take a picture). https://banksimple.com/faq/

They answer a few of these questions on their FAQ: https://banksimple.com/faq/ * They are not a bank. They are essentially a web frontend for wholesale banks. Thus they are regulated differently. * You do have the benefit of FDIC insurance, but it's unclear what ability you have to access your funds directly from the wholesale bank, or whether you are limited to BankSimple.

BankSimple itself does not have a bank charter and is providing its services through bank partners. http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/partners-funding/

See the FAQ (https://banksimple.com/faq/). > Will my deposits be insured by the FDIC? > Yes, all deposits will be insured to the FDIC limit (currently $250,000) through our partner banks at launch, just like with any other major bank (or credit union through the NCUA). FDIC insurance guarantees the safety of your deposits.

The unminified js with comments is public: https://www.banksimple.com/js/brawndo.js

Doesn't https://www.banksimple.com/faq/ answer your question? Also, as they offer at the end of the faq: Why haven’t you answered X? If there is anything you’d like answered, feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected].

It looks like at least one company is trying this: https://www.banksimple.net/about/

If you're comfortable with sharing your data with mint, they offer text alerts for unusual spending / custom triggers you set. http://www.mint.com/ That won't prevent someone from accessing it though. I suppose you could e-mail banksimple and see if they plan on implementing it when they launch: https://banksimple.net/faq/

they will need someone with actual banking experience on their team - http://banksimple.net/team/

Odd, the jobs page [http://banksimple.net/jobs/] works, and from there you can get to the rest of the website...

https://banksimple.com/faq/ gives their USP

Starting a new bank - if only it were that simple. I actually looked into the requirements for establishing a new bank (not in US) and the requirements were so prohibitive (tens of millions in reserve from day one, virtually obliged that no single shareholder hold more than 5-10% stake), not to mention meeting regulatory requirements like BASEL in Europe and SOX in the US mean that the big banks own the market in many countries, with no fear of swifter moving newcomers "eating their lunch". Not to mention people's resistance to change, especially with something as important as their money. And that is only on the retail banking side. It's even worse in i-banking, with the bigger investment banks making more money than ever on Wall Street, as if the crash of 2008 never happened. They may be crooks, but they have the money and influence to make sure the laws get written in their favour - see https://www.banksimple.net/blog/2010/07/21/banks-strike-back/ (there was an article on HN recently around this post.) Also looked into providing the "valuable services" you mention too, a la Mint.com (no equivalent where I live) and this is something I believe there is certain potential (you will have to build a service that taps into banks online portals and offers more useful features than the banks themselves, e.g. account aggregation, financial product comparisons, tailored financial advice etc.) I think the future is one where virtually ordinary transactions will be done online…